Fetch
by chezchuckles
Summary: Season 7. Post-'Reckoning' timeline. "Even knowing how ruthless nature can be, and how cunningly defensive, Kate Beckett is not at all prepared for the blind eyes staring back at her in the morgue."
1. Chapter 1

**Fetch**

* * *

_fetch - (Irish folklore) - supernatural double or apparition of a living person, largely akin to the doppelganger, and sightings are regarded as omens of impending death; perhaps a linguistic association with nightmares._

* * *

**A/N:** This idea got stuck in my head. It's entirely AU, set post 7x15 'Reckoning.' We'll see how this goes.

* * *

Kate Beckett is standing at the whiteboard, tapping a dry erase marker against her chin as she studies the neat line of facts. A murder. An ordinary day. A few possible leads, a few more interviews, but it will come.

She trusts the process, the system, that much.

It's how justice came to her, after all. Bumps in the road, obstacles she faced, yes, but William Bracken is under arrest and the truth has set her free.

It's a new phase to her life. She feels ready to dive into it with Rick, this family they've created. She's rethinking her job, her lifestyle, her motivations. Who knows where-

"Detective - Beckett."

Her head snaps up, and she sees her Captain striding towards her, a strange severity in the woman's eyes. "Yes, sir?"

"In my office." Captain Gates turns partially, but never takes her gaze from Kate, gesturing the detective to go ahead of her.

When Kate enters the office, a trickle of icy alarm slides down her spine as two officers step inside with her, preceding Captain Gates.

Esposito and Ryan are hanging around near the break room, glancing over, mouthing questions at her that she has no answers for.

"Sir?" she asks.

The two officers - she knows them both; she went to LT's daughter's birthday party - shift to block the door.

Her dread sinks like lead in her stomach. This is very bad.

"Detective," Gates says slowly, standing before her own desk to face Beckett. Her gaze travels down slowly and then back up again. "Coast Guard pulled up a body."

She presses her hands to her thighs to keep from revealing any telltale tremors. "Okay."

"I'd like you to take a ride with me, Detective."

"Sir," she chokes out, swallows hard to regain her control. "If something - happened - to Castle, just-"

"No, Detective. It's not him. It's not Richard Castle. It's a woman."

A woman.

Her heart rate still thrums like a plucked string, but it's not Castle. Whoever it is, it's not Castle.

That's all she needs to hear.

"Sir. Where are we going?"

"The morgue."

So they've had the body for a while, and only _now_ are they bringing her in on this?

* * *

Once when Kate was about six years old, she visited her grandparents in upstate New York, staying a week at their farmhouse in the deepest part of the summer. All the windows were open, no air conditioning, and at night with the kitchen lights on, bugs flew at the screens, one after another, a steady strum, the music of undeniable instinct.

She remembers sitting at the wide formica table with her deck of playing cards, pulling out the Aces from each suit and lining them up. Her grandmother was washing dishes at the sink, sturdy shoes and white linen pants, the apron bunched up around her thick middle.

Katie laid the cards out, dealing them slowly to relish the hunt, her ears tuned to the plink-plink of june bugs and hardshell beetles and moths as they popped against the screen. Battering to get in to the light. A few of the smaller insects, gnats and ladybugs, managed to get through the small holes of the screen to hurl their bodies at the globe, only to fall to the table, dazed and stunned, where Kate crushed them under her thumb.

And then she went back to the game.

The rush of water as her grandmother rinsed a dinner dish made a pleasing if erratic concert to the thwack of a card turning over - queen of diamonds, three of spades, seven of spades, six of hearts, joker.

She was swinging her feet, catching the tips of her scuffed sandals against the warped linoleum under her chair. It crackled with every pass. The cards snapped. The water in the pipes often groaned, some added sonant pleasure.

And then a dark shadow passed over the face of her two of clubs, blotting out the card entirely, sweeping across the table with its terrible negative space.

Katie lifted her eyes to the open window at the head of the kitchen table and saw the blind monster's face looming at the screen.

She screamed - one short, choked thing in her throat - and clattered up from the chair and back from the table, cards sliding. The face at the screen folded - impossibly folded - and then spread wider, gaping dark eyes and a slash for a mouth, haunted, before withdrawing into the night.

Her grandmother, unconcerned, took a pot from the steaming, soapy water; her wedding ring clanged against its side. "Don't scream like that. It's only a king moth. Grow big up here."

_A king moth_.

Katie stared at the screen, willing the face to rise up out of the darkness like waking the lady of the lake, but it never came.

Risking a whipping, she left the playing cards at the bug-sticky table and moved heavy-footed into the living room where her grandfather's set of encyclopedias took up two whole shelves of the bookcase. She climbed on the easy chair to reach the _J-K_ and pulled it down, paused at the _M_ and took it as well. She stacked the two volumes with their gold-foil end-pages in her arms and slowly sank down into the overstuffed chair.

She put the _J-K_ on her legs and bobbed her feet as she opened the tissue-paper-thin pages, going carefully so her damp hands wouldn't crinkle them. She scanned the top right corner for the words, flipped page after page looking for _king moth_.

She didn't find it.

Katie closed the _J-K_ with a snap and grabbed the _M_ with both hands, hefted it on top and cracked it open in the middle. Interesting subjects went past: _Malatchi (Chief), martial arts, Mercury_, _Mississippi River, Moonshine Kate-_

She rubbed her thumb over the overexposed black and white photo, the white flare of a round face, much like a moon, exactly like a moon, sitting with a guitar on the back bumper of an old-timey car.

When she finally meandered her way to _moth_, there was a startling giant staring unseeingly back at her.

_Eyespots_, she read.

Nature gives these fragile wings made of colored dust and spiderwebbed veins a shocking, glaring stare to frighten off predators.

Eyes.

Even still, knowing how ruthless nature can be, and how cunningly defensive, Kate Beckett is not at all prepared for the blind eyes staring back at her in the morgue.

Because they are her own.

That's Kate Beckett on the autopsy table.


	2. Chapter 2

**Fetch**

* * *

"God," she gasps, then steps in to get a closer look. "That's... creepy." The hair is hers, but it's flat to the curve of her skull. Same collarbones, strangely, and the idea that Beckett can recognize her own collarbones is highly disconcerting.

Pieces of flesh are missing though - the cheeks, shoulders, fingers, whole toes - most likely from being in the Hudson, and it has the overall effect of something... undead.

A zombie with her own face.

She straightens up and glances around the room.

Perlmutter has clouded eyes, too close-set to read, and beside him is another police officer that Beckett doesn't know. LT and Ramirez from her house are still with them, and Gates is standing at the head of the metal autopsy table with her arms crossed over her chest.

"Is it Tyson?" Kate finally asks. Lanie and Esposito would know, understand this awful sensation washing through her.

_That could be me, should be me, they all saw her and thought - for a terrible moment - that was me._

"Tyson. Jerry Tyson," Gates says, coolly. Her lips are pursed. "Is that what you're going with?"

Kate lifts her gaze from the body - it is entirely absorbing, the whole thing, how _accurate_ it is, uncannily so - and what she sees on her Captain's face makes her blood run cold.

Suspicion.

"Sir? It's - a working theory," she gets out. "A body double - Tyson was proficient at the misdirect, the sleight of hand he could perform with willing but unknowing accomplices. And with a plastic surgeon like Dr Nieman-"

"No, detective. It's not plastic surgery. We've looked."

Her stomach flips. "What - is it?"

"It's a dead woman named Kate Beckett."

Hot _shame_ flashes up through her so fast she can't control it, but she swallows it down and shakes her head. "That's not possible."

"It really does seem quite impossible," Gates says quietly. "And yet."

"No, that's - this is ridiculous. What tests did you perform? Fingerprints? It looks like fish got to her first."

"You said it. Too damaged for fingerprinting."

Kate reaches forward. "Okay, wait, this woman doesn't have a bullet-" She jerks the sheet back, some small relief at that missing - key - difference. "No bullet wound. She wasn't shot."

"No," Gates says quietly. "This woman was never shot."

It occurs to Kate that Captain Gates _never_ met her before - before the bullet that defines so much of her life now. A bullet that pushed Kate out of the city to hole up in the woods for months where no one could reach her. She cut herself off from everyone - the boys, Lanie, even Castle. It was years ago, but-

She has no alibi. No proof of herself to Gates.

No, this is crazy. "Okay, look, I have a tattoo on my hip that my Dad can-"

She has a tattoo. She has _Kate's_ tattoo.

No, no, wait. Okay. Lanie's dead doppelganger did too, right? The one she told no one about. It's on Kate's medical records, probably, most likely. A tattoo is easily duplicated.

"Yes," Gates says, her voice cold as steel. "She has a tattoo. And - quite a lot of medical points match as well."

"DNA? If Tyson was behind this, some kind of final screw-you, then he could have easily hacked the criminal database and set this up-"

"_Easily_ hacked," Gates says. A raised eyebrow.

Beckett is awash in disbelief - aimed directly at herself rather than the body on the table.

"No DNA for Kate Beckett is on file." Perlmutter stuffs his hands into his lab coat pockets. "Dental x-rays are a match."

Kate scrapes a hand through her hair and holds it on top of her head, panic trying to claw up through her guts. After the hearing that ruled the Nieman case a righteous kill, after the three-day mandatory leave pending a psych eval, this is not anything she can deal with steadily.

She thought Tyson was over.

"Dental x-rays," she says, shaking her head. "No DNA on file? That doesn't - wait. You contacted my dentist without my permission-"

"Whose permission?" Perlmutter scoffs.

Kate's jaw drops. And then her indignation flares up, solar and righteous. She takes a step forward, finger jabbing in the air towards the dead woman. "_That_ is not me. That is a very interesting mystery, and one I _will_ get to the bottom of, but that is not _me_. I don't care what the supposed dental records say-"

"They say it's a match," Perlmutter dismisses. "Same corrected overbite. Same crooked back molar that grew in nearly sideways-"

She did not have a crooked back molar. "That's not right," she sputters. "Those are the wrong dental records. Obviously. That's what's happened here. I don't have a crooked molar."

"You don't, but she does. And so does this." Perlmutter turns and slaps an x-ray up against the lightbox, flicks it on with a twist of his fingers. The thing buzzes as it lights up, sudden greys and blacks flaring along the ghost-like impressions of teeth in an angular jaw.

Her jaw/not her jaw.

Crooked back molar.

Perlmutter uses a grease pencil to circle it, as if he's a guest lecturer adding a flourish to his presentation, a touch of triumphant self-satisfaction as he turns to face her. He hates that Castle is back at the precinct, doesn't he? He hates _her_ for marrying him.

He doesn't respect her at all.

He smirks. "That is Kate Beckett."

"You have _got _to be kidding me." She stares at him, but he gives nothing away. "It's - wrong. A mix-up. Something. DNA. What about the DNA?"

Captain Gates steps up to the autopsy table, garnering Kate's attention. "We don't have you on file-"

"That's ridiculous," she mutters. "I'm on _file_. Something must have - Tyson got to it, I'm sure. Part of his scheme. Look, we'll get - I'll _pay_ for an outside lab to do DNA. My dad is out of town, but he'll be more than happy to help clear this up. Familial match will put this to rest."

"Of course," Gates says, nodding serenely, spreading her hands as if to pacify her. "That makes good sense."

Kate glances over her shoulder at Perlmutter but the man's face is blank, the lightbox throwing his features in strange shadow. She glances to the officers in the autopsy suite with them, LT and Ramirez, the one she doesn't know.

"Oh, my God. You think - you think she's me. You think-"

"We don't know what to think," Captain Gates says calmly. "We're going to get to the bottom of this. But in the meantime, Detective, I'm reassigning all your open cases-"

_What?_

"-and giving you this one. This is all you."

"You're taking me off _every_ case?"

"You'll have Ryan. And Mr. Castle, I'm sure. If he still - I can't afford Esposito; he'll be available for poaching, but that's about as much as I can give you."

Ryan. She's been demoted. Basically. Demoted because of a dead woman on the slab who looks like her and has - somehow - dental records matching those given by her own dentist.

This is insane. "I _will_ get to the bottom of this." She sets her jaw as she glances down at the autopsy table.

Her only homicide case. Two detectives one one case _and_ she'll have to use her own resources to solve this murder.

"Wait," she says, eyes lifting to Gates. "This _is_ a homicide, right?"

Gates slides her eyes to Perlmutter. Kate spins around to confront him, but Perlmutter looks sour, mouth twisting.

"I haven't been able to rule it as such. We're waiting on the toxicology report to come back. There's been a backlog."

This is insane.

The dead woman is a _dead_ ringer, but she is not Kate Beckett.


	3. Chapter 3

**Fetch**

* * *

Castle is silent as he stares at the body.

Too quiet. Too quiet for him.

She shifts to his side and his hand comes out and catches hers, squeezing so tightly that her wedding band crunches against the bones of her fingers.

"It's not you," he says. He sounds like he's trying to convince himself. "It's Tyson messing with our heads from beyond the grave."

"That's what I said," she murmurs. They haven't been left alone with the body, which is telling. Ramirez - the officer she doesn't know - is in here with them. "But no evidence of plastic surgery done to her face. No cheek implants. No scars."

"Nieman was very good," he says.

What he doesn't say - what she doesn't have to remind him of - is that Nieman was good, but not that good. This woman just looks exactly like her.

"They got my dental records - someone's dental records - and they're a match."

His head swings around to hers, his blue eyes shuttered. Now that she knows him, it always astonishes her how easily he can close himself off, how he gives absolutely nothing away. In the beginning, she believed the persona was real. Now she sees the facade.

She still isn't able to see past it. "Rick?"

"We'll have to question your dentist," he says. "Whose records those might have been. If he had any break-ins."

"He might not know. Tyson was very good."

"Yeah," he says gruffly. He looks bewildered now. "I don't understand why. Nieman told you she wanted your - look - for herself. So why make a double?"

"I don't know," she mutters. "Toxicology hasn't come back - it's still not ruled a homicide."

"What about DNA?"

"My DNA isn't on file, they said."

"That's not true. For the FBI - you had to. Hell, _I _had to."

"I know. I'm going to contact them. See what's up."

"How did the FBI lose your DNA, Kate?"

"I don't know," she says again. "I don't know, Castle. It's not - none of this makes sense."

His jaw works. So does his mind - his overactive imagination. It's his job; it's the thing that makes them such great partners. He keeps thinking, keeps asking questions. He's asking questions in his own mind; she can see it. She can see him wondering about her, about the version of her on that table.

"Castle?"

"This woman wasn't shot," he says.

"I think it's a little far to go, don't you?" She gestures towards the body draped respectfully on the table. "Shooting someone in the chest isn't-"

"Not exactly an outcome they could control," he says, nodding. "Be a shame to waste all this, right?"

The joke falls flat. Neither of them are smiling.

His fingers loosen from hers and he reaches out and snags the sheet, tugs on it. The tops of the dead woman's breasts are exposed. "No signs of make-up, no kind of superficial scarring. You know if they wanted a _live_ double of you out there, like they did with Lanie and Espo, for a purpose - to get those records out of the 12th - then all they would have to do is a little cosmetic work here."

"Create a scar," she murmurs. "And really, who would see it? So it's not entirely necessary."

"I'd see it," he says. And then scowls fiercely into the dead woman's face. "Other than that, I'd - would I have ever known?"

"You'd have _known_," she hisses, reaching out and plucking his sleeve. He leans back and comes to her side again, leaving the sheet awkwardly draped.

"I hope so."

"Castle," she mutters, rolling her eyes at him.

He gives her a quirk of his lips, fingers curling around hers, just barely, that habit of touching/not-touching they established early on when they were trying to keep their relationship a secret. _Their _relationship. She's his. He's hers. The dead woman on the table is nothing but a mystery.

"Only one woman can roll her eyes like you," he murmurs. "Even with a dizzying array of hair styles, only Kate Beckett rolls her eyes at me with all that love."

She huffs, but she can't help wondering. Wondering about the timing of all of this. A lack of a scar means nothing; it's the dental records, the bone structure without alterations, the lack of DNA on file...

"What were they trying to do here?" she says finally. "What was their purpose with this?"

"I don't know," he says slowly. The writer doesn't have a story that fits? "Honestly, if we didn't know Tyson and Nieman were dead, it would feel like the prelude to something. Something big."

She takes a short breath. "Something bad."

His fingers wrap around hers and hold on.

Something very bad. No good can come of this, but there's nothing else she can do. This is the only case she has; this woman - whoever she was - deserves justice.

* * *

"Independent lab in Canada," he tells her.

She nods, watching his fingers as he seals the package. The loft is dark; it's been so quiet with his mother out searching for apartments. Alexis still hangs around, of course, but lately it's just been the two of them.

Kate can't help but feel threads of anxiety. What might happen next. What new horror is in the offing.

"Canada," he stresses. "Nowhere on Tyson's radar. Right? He can't have rigged anything, can't have bribed someone in Canada."

"But you - I mean, the bank was in Montreal."

His face drops for a second, but he rallies fast. "Must be instinct, huh? Okay, okay, no, this still works. It's Vancouver. Not even on this coast. And they have a great reputation."

She nods again, willing to let his confidence bolster her own.

"I'll mail it right now. Take it to the post office myself."

"Not the one near us," she says quickly. "Just - in case."

"Oh," he says, wiping a hand down his face. "Wow. You're right. We don't want this going astray."

She scrapes a hand through her hair and has to will herself not to slump in defeat. It feels impossible. "They're dead," she reminds herself, reminds him as well. "They're dead but what did we miss, what are we missing here?"

"They planned. Plots. Machinations. Tyson had patience. He had a scary amount of patience."

"Always five or six steps ahead-"

"Even from prison-"

"And we have _no_ evidence, nothing to build a case, nothing to compare-"

"And this woman," he insists. "I don't get it, Kate. What were they _doing_-"

She growls, pacing away. "We act like they're not dead. We're acting like it's a foregone conclusion that Tyson did this. The truth is, Castle, we don't know_._"

Castle closes his mouth, wincing.

She drops her hands and turns around, her eyes roving the loft in vain. There are no answers for this.

"So we go back to the evidence," Castle says quietly. "Toxicology report comes in on Monday. The lab in Canada - they said a week for results. This woman exists - she existed somewhere before she wound up in the Hudson. So let's start there. Establish the timeline."

She turns to look at him over her shoulder. Resilient, always hopeful, confident Rick Castle.

She could use some of that right now.


	4. Chapter 4

**Fetch**

* * *

Kate Beckett has always been the type of girl who likes to curl up on the windowseat with her nose in a book - rain or shine. But her mother was a hands-on kind of woman, pushing Kate to participate in family life by making the sausage casserole for Sunday brunch or walking with her to the law office to research a case. _Be in the world, Katie._

She doesn't mind _learning _about the world. She has her own curiosity to appease, and she'll readily admit that her father's style of teaching always resonated a little more than her mother's. But his hours of conversations spent looking up long-dead history in their set of encyclopedias (identical to her grandfather's; it must have been a family trait) weren't top on Katie's list of ideal activities on a Saturday afternoon either.

Being an only child meant finding clever ways to escape her parents' well-meaning intentions, to hide her antisocial leanings by escaping the too-small apartment - into the city, navigating its blocks, riding its subways - all in an effort to read a book.

She just wanted to read.

It's not the kind of behavior a detective-in-the-making usually had. Detectives are all about observation. Katie was absorbed in the fictional worlds, not her own.

Until the summer before she turned thirteen.

She found herself bothered by people on the subway lines, never left alone long enough to read a full page, let alone an entire book. Before that summer, Katie had propped her feet up on the plastic seat across from her, riding backwards up and down and across her city. Her city, proprietary that way, thinking about how she owned it just because she lived in it. (Foolish, she tells herself now. Foolish to be that naive at not-yet thirteen. Foolish that her mother never warned her either. Unless _be in the world_ was some kind of obscure hidden meaning for _people suck_.)

It was Manhattan, she always told her parents she was at a nearby park (whose stop she conveniently, consistently 'missed' because she was sucked into her book), and she never had a problem.

Until that summer. Twelve years old, long brown hair that ran in a wave down her back in the heat, curling a little around her ears. A training bra under her t-shirt, and shorts that had been at the knee the summer before but weren't any longer. More like mid-thigh.

Her legs were too long, and she didn't know it yet.

She got looks. She got comments and friendly conversation and nudges (_isn't this your stop, sweetheart?)_. Ew. Sweetheart?

She got _noticed_. That was the problem. And so the subway was no longer a safe haven, no longer the windowseat where she curled up to read her books.

She ended up getting off at her stop and threading her way through the pedestrian traffic to a little park sandwiched between two office buildings. At first she tried to read on the walk there, but it proved impossible - running into people, trash cans, utility poles. Nearly getting clipped by a taxi taking a right turn during the walk sign.

She was reduced to reading on park benches. It seemed an inferior way to experience her favorite books, but soon it hardly mattered. Soon she was hunting a murderer and being left for dead on an iceberg, or trekking through River Heights on the trail of a blackmailer, or baby-sitting for a family from California whose father might be doing something illegal.

She had books. She forgot she was stuck in a children's park crammed between office buildings, on an uncomfortable metal park bench while nannies and harried mothers tried to mediate playground fights. She was able to go down so deep into those novels that common, everyday things barely registered. She didn't hear the nasty little boys or the whiny bratty girls, she didn't notice the sun climbing or sinking in the sky, she didn't care about the heat wave, she didn't hear the ice cream man, she didn't feel the buzzing interest of gnats or the sting of mosquitos.

But one day she did.

Something tugged at her consciousness, something faintly important seemed to insinuate itself into her awareness so that when she looked up, her eyes were drawn to the playground, mindlessly. Finally distracted from glaciers and murder and girl detectives, Katie found herself drawn out.

Culled.

She felt like a raw and peeled thing, pulled out of one world and dropped, blind and vulnerable, in this one with no defenses and no instructions.

What had led her here, what had called her name and deceived her into awareness and observation of the real world?

Katie blinked in the etiolated light of her shaded spot under a broad-leafed tree, felt then the strange sensation of sticky fingers across her bare ankle.

She looked.

At first she thought a stick had fallen from the tree above to land precariously on her drawn up feet resting on the metal park bench. At first it was just fine, all was still right, nothing amiss.

And then it moved.

Three inches long, the stick crept along her ankle and up the side of her bare calf, its own legs like branches, and _eyes_.

_Stick-bug_, her brain supplied, but her book-tender heart panicked. She jerked, spasming on the bench so that the novel fell to the dirt and her elbows smacked into the hard metal, but the thing on her didn't shake loose.

She yelped and brushed her hand down her leg, and for one terrifying, stomach-churning instant, the stick-bug clung to her fingers.

And then it was gone. Tossed off into the grass and disappearing, natural camouflage, so that it could be anywhere at all.

It could be anywhere.

With her palms sweat-damp and her t-shirt sticking to her back, book abandoned, Katie sank to her haunches on the bench and stared at the ground, searching, seeking.

She had to know where it was before she could move. _Had_ to know.

She was stuck on that bench, hoping it was gone but knowing it was waiting, patiently, disguising itself as one of the hundreds of sticks shed by the great tree overhead.

Waiting. Hours.

Kate Beckett has never been a fan of nature, but the experience proved that nature isn't necessarily a fan of hers, either.

From then on, she paid attention.

Nancy Drew novels and L'Engle's coming of age stories might have given her the language for mystery, but the stick-bug gave her the eyes to see.

_Pay attention, the world is out to get you._

So when the DNA results come back after a long, fruitless week of investigation, when Castle eagerly rips open the envelope with the plastic window that has their neatly typed address _Mr and Mrs Castle _she should see it coming.

_Be in the world_.

Castle's face loses color, eyes going dull as he scans the letter first. Then his gaze jerks frantically up to read it again. His hands are shaking so badly that the paper rustles.

The loft is very quiet. He isn't even breathing. His mouth opens and closes again.

"Rick." He doesn't look at her. "Castle?"

He swallows and presses the letter to the top of the granite countertop. It folds up and she has to catch the edges, smooth it flat just to read.

Her knees give, but he doesn't catch her. Her knees give and she grips the bar stool, sinking, vision twisting at the typed words.

It says. It says.

She is not her father's daughter.


	5. Chapter 5

**Fetch**

* * *

She sucks in a breath and curls her knees up to her chest, her cheek pressed to their tops and her eyes unseeing, filled with the great darkness of the city outside their windows.

It rings and rings. It echoes as it rings. It's endless.

"Katie?" His voice on the phone is so small. "It's nearly midnight. What's wrong?"

"Dad, we got the DNA results back." She sounds so normal. The words come easily because they are routine, the usual jargon of her daily life. "The swab you sent and mine and the unidentified woman-"

"Oh, yes. Strange. Was the sample bad? I told you the instructions on that kit were not that clear. I think it was made in China."

A plosive of laughter leaves her, incongruent to the fragile way she's holding her phone like it's her own heart. "I - I don't know actually. Maybe it was. But the results came back."

"Inconclusive?" He sounds incredulous.

"Not inconclusive, actually. But - conclusively not - we're not a familial match."

"Well, sweetheart, of course we're not. I could have told you that."

Kate gasps, jerking upright.

But Jim goes on. "Your mother's family isn't that big. And you know mine. Of course we're not family. She's just an unfortunate girl who looks like you-"

She finally breathes. "No, that's not - Dad. Not us and her, you and me."

He laughs.

Kate flutters a hand down her face and sees Castle haunting the office through the open shelves, worried about her. "Dad?"

"I'm sorry, this is your case; it's not really that funny. But it's a bust, isn't it? The whole thing. Are you going to try it all over again with a different lab?"

"Dad. Dad, the results say I'm not your daughter."

"That's clearly not true."

"But it-"

"Katie," he chides. "Honey, I was there when you were born. And as much as you might not want to know it, I was there when you were conceived-"

"Oh, my God," she groans.

"And whatever a test said, whatever those results are, they're wrong. Bad batch. I couldn't read those ridiculous directions."

"They _were_ poorly written," she murmurs, feeling a lure of hope. Even Castle complained about the grammar all day, reading over her shoulder. Lodge swab, it said, something like that; they both laughed.

"If you need me to do it again, I will. I do hope you find out the girl's name, get an ID. Her poor parents."

Kate sighs a long breath, catches Castle's gaze on her and gestures him inside. He comes swiftly, straight for her, no hesitation.

She takes his hand as her father winds up their phone call. "Sorry I woke you up," she says. "Have a good night, Dad."

"You too, honey. Tell Rick I said hi."

"I will."

End of discussion. Not even a discussion. He was there when she was born.

* * *

Kate stands numbly in the threshold to their bedroom. She doesn't know where to go next. What happens to the dead woman in the morgue. What happens to _her._

"Since your mother isn't here to say it, I will."

She blinks at him.

Castle beams. "I told you so."

She actually lets out a laugh, her relief complete now that Rick has pronounced himself firmly on her side. "Thanks for that."

"Any time, Beckett. I'm here for you," he grins. His fingers are deft as he unbuttons his sharp grey dress shirt. He looks distinguished tonight, official. Officially handsome. She likes it.

Earlier, Kate didn't manage to calm her nerves long enough to shed her own clothes, but now she's glad for it. His hands are so steady, he can do all the work tonight. Find herself again, with him.

She moves into the room and saunters towards him, her hips starting to sway, shoulders loosening, with every breath, every step.

"It's funny," he says, looking down at his final button, popping it free. "For the dead woman to be you, Original of Kate-" He flashes a grin up at her, all excitement and story-telling. "-then you would've been switched out years ago. Living with the double for _years._"

She freezes.

"No bullet, right? So just how far back would we have to go to get the Original?" Castle grins again, opening his arms as he peels off his dress shirt. She can smell the day-long deodorant of him wafting to her, the laundry and skin-oil scents settled into his undershirt.

"How far back..." she echoes uselessly.

His starts on his belt, those competent hands that she loves, craves even right now. Even as he talks, weaving a story that has her immobile in the middle of the room, she wants his hand to claim her hip, cradle the side of her face. Reassurance.

"How far back in our history, you know? If you weren't switched out, maybe we wouldn't have even been here." A little gasp as he thinks of it. "Ooh, I know. Early, early - when you were all bristling and pursed-lips and disapproving brow. What if-"

She lets out a long breath, that icy grip around her heart beginning to melt down her spine. "Oh," she sighs. "Okay, I - I see. I get it. You mean back when it was hate at first sight?" She can't help but hear the faint nastiness in her voice.

He hurt her feelings, she realizes. Stupid; it's stupid. He loves to tell the story, loves to flesh it out. She should have seen this coming. Of _course_ Castle wants to daydream morbidly right now.

Castle is watching her, a little wary.

"How do you think anything would have changed for you, Rick?" she says, teasing now, softer. She steps into him and circles his waist with her arms, embracing him. "Switching me out with my six years ago self? If I had never gotten shot, I wouldn't be any good to you. That girl had no idea." She nudges her hips into his.

He leaves off undoing his belt and slides his arms around her waist, a little squeeze at her backside. "Espo called you a control freak, remember? Better than shark week. But I never got the man-eater." He gives her a crooked grin. "So if you're the evil twin, don't tell me. You're the one I want."

She finally breathes easy, grinning up at him, and lifts to her tiptoes to give him a soft kiss.

And then she bites his bottom lip, tugs with her teeth until he squeaks.

"I can be a man-eater if that's what you're looking for, Rick Castle."


	6. Chapter 6

**Fetch**

* * *

His fingers trail up and down her thigh, lying beside her in bed, both of them on their backs. The room is overly warm, or maybe it's her, but still she turns her body into him, rests her cheek on his shoulder. Reconnecting after that spectacular round of - connecting.

"Feel better?" he hums.

"Yeah," she admits. She feels like herself again.

"You want to talk about it?"

"Don't harsh my buzz," she mutters. But maybe they should. "I don't know what's going on here, Rick."

"Me either."

"I'm disappointed. I was really hoping for some crazy theory."

"Oh, I have crazy theories. My current one is that you're a pod person. The mothership will be back for you once you've accomplished your mission."

She chuckles at that, slides her palm flat to his bare chest. His skin is still hot to the touch, and damp, where the sweat hasn't yet cooled him. She smooths the tip of her finger against the scratch she must have brought up on his shoulder, leans in to kiss the welt. "I'm the pod person, huh? I think she's the pod person."

"What's the point in killing the clone?" he says, the amusement making his voice rise lightly and caress her. "Although, technically, still hasn't been ruled a homicide."

She feels better for talking, strangely enough. "What's the purpose in replacing me - I'm sorry, _her_ \- with me? What do I hope to achieve? What _is _my mission if I'm a pod person from outer space?"

"Sex me to death. That's the only explanation."

Kate laughs, lifting up on her elbow to look in his eyes, pushing a fast kiss to his cheek when she sees him wriggling his eyebrows. "In your dreams, Rick Castle."

"Yes, well, fine. In my dreams, too. Then I'm really done for."

"So this all revolves around you, does it?"

"Of course."

She grins but settles back at his side, hugging herself against him.

He cups her shoulder, caresses down to her neck in a move that makes her shiver. "In this together, Kate."

* * *

They called it a virgin birth.

Kate wasn't there, no, not in 2001, but she remembers the feeding frenzy, like scenting chum in the water, the sense that life somehow overcomes nature, that hope doesn't float but _swims _even in captivity.

The miracle of divinity occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, as dust-ridden and obscure a place as Bethlehem, and when the scientists and media crowded around the shark tank-cum-manger, they saw only a twelve inch-long, single hammerhead pup.

Usual litters can have in excess of thirty, but this lonely messiah huddled in the corner, abandoned by its hammerhead mother as biology dictates. Not much to look at, this pale shadow in the water, but baptism by forsakenness was all it would get.

It was killed within hours of its birth by a stingray in the same tank.

Just like that, its crucifixion short, brutal, and obscene.

The zoo closed down the tank, moved the aquatic creatures to neighboring pools, scooped out the body.

Assumption at the time was that one of the three hammerheads in the tank - all of which were female - had stored male sperm for years. Those creatures do have the ability, but the zoologists shook their heads. It would require one of the females to have copulated in the wild as babies themselves, which was quite improbable.

Less improbable than the truth, though.

The autopsy revealed that the baby's DNA was a perfect match to one of the female hammerheads.

Complete match. Full set. Every marker. They ran the test four times.

Never had parthenogenesis revealed itself in sharks or mammals. Spontaneous asexual reproduction. Something from nothing.

_Something from nothing._

* * *

"Bad news," Lanie says, cradling the chart against her chest as they enter the autopsy suite.

"You're already done?" Castle asks her, not even saying hello.

Kate already feels halfway out the door with quite a large number of her co-workers (rumors abound), and she has the urge to reassure Lanie of her selfhood. She leans over and offers the ME an embrace, but it only causes Lanie to give her a strange look.

Not Lanie too. No. She can't-

Lanie holds up a staying hand. "All right, honey, look. I took my time with this one, but Perlmutter is as thorough as I am. He did everything right."

Kate blanches. "But the dental work-"

"Have you talked to your dentist?" Lanie asks calmly. Leading.

"Of course we have," Kate says, her hands in fists. She takes a short breath. "We have. He has a large practice. He says he remembers me, but honestly, it's usually a hygienist who does the work and he comes by and pats my cheek, looks inside, and it's done. He has no idea. And whatever records were sent over - either way, it's a dead end for us."

"Well, these are the x-rays we have, and these are a match for this woman on my table." Lanie is frowning.

"At least tell us you found something in your autopsy," Castle says. "There has to be something we can use, a clue."

"I did find... one thing," Lanie says. A hesitant glance to Kate.

Castle takes a step up, right at Kate's side. "What did you find? At least give us another avenue to investigate."

Her friend crosses her arms tighter around the chart. She's wearing scrubs, a pair of running shoes; she doesn't look like her usual self. No lip gloss, her usually straightened hair is pulled back in a simple bun and fly-aways bristle at her forehead. "Lanie, how long have you been here?"

"I don't know what to tell you, Kate. I'm an employee of OCME and they require me to log every-"

"What did you find?" Kate grits out, bracing herself for it. It must be bad. It sounds really bad, and Lanie looks haggard.

Her friend takes a breath. "A bone fracture. Healed. Estimate ten years previous."

2005, Kate thinks. Where was she then? What was she-

"I'm sorry. It matches," Lanie says. She pulls the chart away from her chest and glances down, as if she needs to read it one more time. "That time you broke your toes. And I know there's no hospital record of it. But I have to tell them the truth."

Kate goes blank.

Castle lets out a breath. "So tell them the truth. It's just one more way in which they've made this woman match Beckett. I bet Tyson put that in their want ad. Seeking: one woman with a former foot fracture from-"

"I didn't break my foot," Kate blurts out. "I didn't break my foot ten years ago."

"Oh," Castle laughs. "Then that's even better. No broken foot. You're you."

"Toes," Lanie chokes.

"Toes," Kate amends. "I never broke my toes. So that's that."

Lanie's mouth drops open. "Kate."

"If you're worried, don't be. I'm not asking you to fudge the results here. We're all trying to get to the bottom of this."

Castle is nodding, giving Lanie that charming smile of his, but Lanie is... staring at her. Castle takes the chart from Lanie's limp arms. "Look, we can get Kate's foot x-rayed, show there are no fractures. And since her hospital records will match, that's good for us."

Kate smiles over at him. "If this woman broke her foot, then we might be able to trace her care-"

"I was your care," Lanie insists, leaning forward. "K-Kate? You came to _me_. Chasing down a suspect and it would be - they were going to force you to do workers' comp and you said, _can't you just look at it_. So I taped your toes."

"Lanie," she protests. She can't fathom why Lanie is saying this.

"On a chainlink fence," Lanie stutters out. "A chainlink - you went up and over and got caught and your toes twisted and you fell."

"Ouch," Castle mutters.

Kate steps back, her mouth moving, words falling all over themselves. "Lanie. Lanie, I've never broken my toes."

"It's _how we met._"


	7. Chapter 7

**Fetch**

* * *

It's not her idea to spread the album of mug shots out before their witness. She has no hope of getting any kind of positive response, and she gives Castle a dark look for it.

He shrugs at her as if to say, _what can it hurt?_ And it's true, this is her only case and she has the time to baby-sit the man as he thumbs through page after page, slowly, with great care.

She chose not to do this in the interrogation room because she has a feeling this man has seen the inside of one too many police stations. He's marginally more relaxed here in the conference room; his shoulders have come down from his ears. Unfortunately, he also looks like he's used to getting a payday for his information, and she doesn't want to encourage that.

(She's still upset over Lanie. She had a panic attack that doubled her over, her hands on her knees to gulp air that wouldn't come. Castle pushed her out of the autopsy suite and talked to Lanie without her for a good long time; she could hear them whispering about her in between her wheezing breaths, her eyes closed. She sat on the cold tile the whole time, unable to get the energy to rise, and then Castle came out and stood her on her feet and she was so pathetically grateful. Nothing was resolved. Nothing _is _resolved. She feels like she's scrambling to catch up, and everyone else has gone on ahead of her.)

Castle is leaning against the far window, arms crossed in confident appraisal as the man flips another page in the book. Since her husband was also the one who realized that their homeless drifter was a witness to the body's dumping, she supposes he deserves a little self-righteous smugness, as much as it annoys her.

She can smell the alcohol on Robert Fletcher and she's not as certain of his reliability as Castle claims.

The idea that a man carried a body out of the back of his truck and down to the edge of an abandoned factory loading dock and then dumped it in plain view of the homeless man seeking refuge in the lee of a storage shed is close to ridiculous.

But she can't deny that the drifter's story, voluntarily offered up when Kate identified herself as NPYD, does hit their time frame perfectly. The dead woman went into the water in a narrow range of weeks, and Fletcher gave them a markedly specific story that so far jives with everything Lanie and Perlmutter have established.

The body went into the Hudson in September/early October. They used the same current and maritime charts Kate used when Castle was returned to retrace her doppelganger's journey, backtracking from the spot where the dead woman washed up to the line of factories along the river.

They've spent the last four days combing the industrial complexes in the hopes that familiarity would breed clues. Castle found the homeless man, Kate flashed her credentials, and Robert Fletcher said, with a wry sense of hopelessness, _I suppose you're here about the body. Took you long enough._

She isn't entirely certain this isn't a set-up. But who or why, she has no idea.

"Tell me again, Mr. Fletcher," she says into the page-flipping. "Where you were, what time of day-"

"Weren't day," he mutters into the album. His face lifts to her. "Night. I told you that. You forget?"

"Say I have. Tell me again," she says, searching for holes, cracks, something.

"Night. Cold at night, but the days got hot in all my layers. Lose/lose, like they say. I weren't doing nothing but shivering, the metal cold you know and taking out my body heat. Which is how I remember when it was. That terrible time of the year when the weather can't make up its damn mind what it is. Cold, hot, back and forth in misery."

"September?" Castle interrupts, a little more leading than she would like him to be.

Fletcher bobs his head. "September - end of. Late so that you know fall is coming. Maybe October."

"And then what?" Kate asks.

"And then the truck just - pulled it right up against the chain link. But I knew it weren't nothing to hold it back - and he probably did too - because he gunned it a little and the chain link creaked and the gate popped open. That's what made me watch. On the look out, you see?"

"Just in case he found you," Castle added.

"That too. He were up to no good. Popping open that gate? And then he was a small man, smaller 'un me, and he drags this thing out of the back of his truck and out to the edge by the water."

"Thing," Kate asks.

"Well, I guess I knew it was a body, alright. I guess I knew. You see something like that, covered in a blue tarp like it's nothing more than a ruined carpet, and you know."

"You know," Castle echoes. "Was there a boat?"

Kate startles, glancing at him. Robert never-

"I suppose there was," Robert sighs. Deeply, a kind of bitter reluctance in it.

Kate didn't see that coming, not one bit. How in the world did Castle jump that far? "A boat. You suppose there was a boat." _Leading the witness_, her mother would warn her. Introducing evidence not seen.

"I suppose he signaled to a boat."

"You suppose he _signaled_-"

Castle stands up straighter, his movement cutting her off. "He get a signal back?"

"I don't know no morse code, man."

Morse code. Light in dots and dashes. Is this true at all? Is any of this true, or has Castle just put words in Robert's mouth?

But Castle has a strange look on his face, pushes past the wood table and out of the conference room. Kate watches the door for a second, stunned all over again, and then looks back at Fletcher.

He's frowning down at the book.

"You didn't say there was a boat before," Kate says quietly.

"I didn't quite believe what I saw," Fletcher answers. "And as I'm sitting here, it got to be real... _real_. That girl's face on the board - that's her, ain't it?"

Kate flinches, looks over her shoulder through the open blinds. Yes, the dead woman's face is up on the board still. "Yes, that's her." That's not good; Robert had been paying better attention than Kate realized, and now this whole interview is suspect.

Castle rushes back inside, his fingers clutching an 8.5x11 glossy photo of another dead person, and the shock of it makes her stumble back into the table.

He slaps the photo down in front of Fletcher. "Is this who you saw?"

Robert puts a arthritic hand to the photo, covers the face with those gnarled fingers. "Could be." And then a slow nod, glancing up at Castle as if deciding something. "Yeah, you got it. That's him. Or was him. I suppose he's dead? Sure does look it here."

The dead man in the photo is Henry Jenkins.

* * *

In the quiet of the conference room, he finally speaks, and she can hear the raw honesty in his voice. The fear.

"Kate, what does my disappearance last summer have to do with this?"

Why is she so _relieved_ that he still calls her Kate? She's letting Lanie, and the looks, and whispers get to her. "What do you mean?"

"You heard what he said," Castle says urgently.

Their witness with the sudden memory. "I don't think you can trust a man like that."

"I don't think we have much else to go on."

She subsides into silence, the conference room filled with the twilight of a late-coming darkness. Sliding closer and closer to spring, even if it doesn't feel like it. Snow on the streets, slush on the sidewalks, ice hanging over their heads.

"Castle, I think you're jumping to conclusions, and I think a good lawyer would say you led the witness."

"Robert Fletcher said that was the guy."

"The guy he saw in the dead of night, no working lights at an abandoned factory on the water. The guy who - alone - hauled a body out of the back of a truck and dumped it in the Hudson. Who signaled a boat - this miraculous boat that _you _brought into existence with one question?"

Castle rubs a hand down his face, but she can tell he's latched onto this and won't be dissuaded. She shouldn't have used those maritime maps; it has only brought the whole thing to mind, lodged it there like a burr.

He was gone this summer, and now he must wonder. Everything changed around him, why not her too? She can _hear _him thinking it.

"Kate I asked him about a boat because they found me in that rowboat, a healed gunshot, around the same time."

"It could have been as late as October," she insists, but even she can hear how feeble it sounds.

"And I can't fathom any reason for me to stay away from you of my own volition. To not even attempt contact. To create those videos, to have the freedom to deposit them in a bank, but not go _find_ you?"

She can't fathom it either. "You must have had a good reason."

"Maybe so," he says thickly, head in his hands now. "Maybe because I thought I had you."

"What," she croaks.

He lifts his head with a bleakness on his face that guts her. "Maybe she was you, and I didn't make a break for it until they'd - they'd killed her. You. Maybe you're what kept me there, and your death is what pushed me to go."


	8. Chapter 8

**Fetch**

* * *

After Robert leaves, the silence is clammy with ghosts, missing time that haunts the air between them.

And then one ray of light pierces the mist, burns off the doubts, and Kate shakes her head. "No. Castle. This isn't about last summer. Because that dead woman has _no_ gunshot wound. Would you have really not noticed? All those weeks-?"

Castle lets out a breath and scrubs both hands down his face. "I'd have noticed." He shivers. "Yeah, yeah, I would have noticed if you didn't - if she didn't - hadn't been shot."

"This has nothing to do with y- last summer," she gets out. She almost wishes it did, just to have a place to start. "Castle, I'm sorry, but you made a conclusion and led Robert Fletcher straight to where you wanted to go."

He nods, but it's mindless, just a continuous bobbing of his head without real meaning.

"Rick, I know last summer is frustrating for you, for both of us. We both want answers, and we've had to be content with-" She spreads her hands and can't find words that will penetrate his troubled absorption. "But you can't see your own - issue - in every case that comes across my desk."

Castle is staring off into the distance, not looking at her, and she feels the need to fling more words into the dark void of his eyes.

"Fletcher is what you would call an unreliable narrator," she says, going for a literary device with the hope it might appeal to him. "He gives out pieces, crumbs, and we read into the situation whatever we think we see. He's as good a con artist as a psychic."

His eyes flick over to hers, once, that dart of indignation. She said it on purpose, knowing it would rouse something in him like defense.

He finally clears his throat. "A grifter. Drifter-grifter. Doing what he can to survive? But we didn't pay him for his information."

"No," she says quickly, "but I wouldn't be surprised if he comes back looking for-"

And just at that moment, the conference room door clicks open, a harried and annoyed Esposito standing with his hand on the knob. He jerks his head to a shadow behind him. "You got a Robert Fletcher up here, says he was just talking to you, Beckett, and left something behind."

"Yes," she answers, standing up straighter. Robert comes pushing his way inside the conference room with his hands politely behind his back.

Esposito hangs out for a moment, eyes narrowed at the homeless man, but when Robert pointedly doesn't look at him, or anyone else, Espo huffs and backs out of the room. The door shuts behind him and rattles the window blinds.

Robert brings his hands in front of him and twists them together. Arthritic, nearly crippled. One thumb juts out at a wrong angle and Kate feels a jerk of pity that is both unprofessional and unhelpful.

Let there be no pity, only sympathy. Respect for a fellow human being.

"Mr. Fletcher, you left something behind?" she asks. She glances at the chair where he was sitting, but there are no forlorn articles of clothing. "Did you forget something?"

He lifts his eyes to Castle, not her, and talks to him instead, rocking on his heels. "Yes, I surely forgot something. I surely forgot. All that talking, wears a man out, yes it does. You know what I mean, Mr. Castle."

Kate's heart drops heavy. Castle's false smile is pasted quickly over the remains of his trust, and he steps up to Robert with a cheerful countenance, shaking the other man's hand. "I do know what you mean. We've asked you a lot of questions, Mr. Fletcher, and we do appreciate how cooperative you've been."

Robert flashes a pleased smile. "Well, I do thank you, and I was wondering just how much appreciating you was going to do my way. Don't think as I heard you say."

Kate moves to intercept, to extricate Castle from Fletcher's on-going yarn-spinning, but her husband gestures her off with a hand. "I didn't yet say, Mr. Fletcher, but I was about to pick up dinner for these fine detectives. You mind helping me carry it back? I'm sure we'll find you something."

Castle is already leading Fletcher out of the conference room, and she knows he has a list on his phone - just like she does - with contacts for Room At the Inn who will put Robert up for the night. It's supposed to snow again tomorrow, and she expects her husband is already planning ways to look in on Fletcher, scheming to provide him a few warm meals while the man will let him.

Kate hugs her elbows as she watches them depart the bullpen, her husband leaning in to smile at something Fletcher has said to him, his heart and his grace on display for anyone to see.

But she's the only one who's looking.

* * *

Rick crawls into bed and collapses there with a groan, still in his dress shirt and slacks, his shoes on his feet, and his face hidden by the pillow.

She still has a terrible headache, but something eases having his body so close. She rolls to her back and reaches out a hand to touch his shoulder, caressing down to the thick line of his bicep. "Robert?"

He grunts. "He's making it all up." His voice is muffled by the pillow. "The more I did for him, the more he invented. Fabricated on the spot. Everything, Kate. It's all lies."

She strokes the cool material of his dress shirt. "But you tried to help," she murmurs, moving her head to stare up at the ceiling. She can picture all too well the persistent nature of her husband's generosity.

"He's not interested."

At his sigh, she rolls on her side, cups the back of his elbow. Castle turns his face to her. He studies her a moment, sorrow filling up the space between them, a heavy kind of weight.

"He'll probably go back down to that abandoned factory the moment he can sneak away from the shelter."

"Some people aren't meant to be trapped," she whispers, but it's not comforting, and she knows that. She shifts closer and brushes the backs of her fingers along his jaw, skims his ear until she can comb through his hair. "You're a good man, Rick."

"I didn't do Robert a bit of good."

"And he didn't do you any either," she murmurs.

His jaw works and he turns to put his forehead back into his pillow. She can see only the distinct profile of his chin, and below her hand, the jutting hunch of his shoulders. He doesn't say anything, and maybe she shouldn't have either.

_Let it go, Kate._

She does actually love this about him, his mercy for others. He listens to their stories, and he empathizes, just as she does, but while her compassion has natural limits, Castle also wants to give all the world a second chance. Mercy.

Kate has been burned too many times to be very good about offering that kind of trust to another person.

She pushes her elbow into the mattress and levers herself up, slides out of bed while he grunts something about being cold and miserable. When she moves to the foot of the bed, she catches a glimpse of snow outside the windows, falling silent and furious, like the thick flakes might white out the world.

Her steps are muffled by the rug, and she kneels down at the edge of the bed. Castle must sense her, or at least become curious, because he turns his head on the pillow and glances down at her.

Kate reaches out and tugs the black lace of his dress shoe. His foot twitches as he jerks a knee, but she grips him by the heel before he can move away. She tugs the shoe off his of right foot, and then as he pushes up and turns, sitting, she catches his other foot and takes that shoe off as well.

She stands and places his shoes under the chair before the closet, comes back to him at the bed. He's staring up at her, a kind of heartbreaking incomprehension on his face.

She's never done this before.

She hooks a finger in his dress sock and slowly tugs the constricting material down his calf, over his heel, and off. His toes clench in the air and release again, and she does the same to the other foot, dropping his socks to the floor.

When he's discalced and stunned, his hair sticking up golden in the bathroom nightlight like a halo, she only leans in and presses a kiss to his mouth, softly. He tastes like winter air, his lips faintly chilled.

She moves her fingers to the buttons of his dress shirt, working industriously at each one. His hands come up as if to help but fall once more to his lap, great bear paws, curled in their strength.

She slides her palms down his arms to pull each sleeve off, and he works his shoulders to join the effort. His face is slack with tiredness, but it leaves his eyes alight with love.

When his shirt is off, she folds it and layers it over the chair, turns around to find he's gotten his pants off himself; she takes those and settles them on the arm as well. He holds out a hand to her and catches her fingers, tugs so that she comes back to the bed.

Wordlessly, they lie down together, spooning, his body warm and snow-scented, and she maneuvers his arm around her, their clasped hands between her breasts. He settles his chin at the valley of her shoulder and neck, breathes out softly.

His other hand reaches up and captures a lock of her hair, rubbing it between his fingers. She keeps her eyes on the window on her side of the bed, her body curled to the question of his.

"I told you - and you know it's true - that I love the mystery of you," he says, his voice as thick as the snow outside. His nose drops to her neck and he gives a sad juddering sigh. "But then I'm so grateful when you show me - yourself, all of you - like this."


	9. Chapter 9

**Fetch**

* * *

Kate surreptitiously shifts her eyes to him, watching Castle fiddle intently with his phone. He's been on it all morning, sitting in his chair beside her desk, thumb-typing. But not communicating with someone - there is no telltale ding of a message going out or the swoosh of an email sent. Sometimes he cribs together lines for the next book on his notepad app. Maybe that's all it is.

Otherwise quiet. So quiet. No one talks to her. Other detectives avoid her except for when she asks them direct questions, pointblank rubs all their noses in it. Lanie is 'busy' at OCME and they play text-tag all night. LT has been put on a later shift. When Beckett lifts her gaze, she often sees Captain Gates watching her through the office window.

Maybe it's in her head; she can't separate out this case from reality any longer. Everywhere she turns is another stumbling block and with that obstacle comes doubt.

Ryan looks at her funny. Esposito doesn't care, not outwardly, but Ryan and Castle are having these break room conversations that make her shoulders hunch.

Castle's phone rings just then, and she nearly laughs at the way he yelps, startled, staring at his phone like it's some kind of divine revelation.

"Rick?" she says, a chuckle bubbling in her chest that won't come out. He jerks his head up guiltily and cradles the phone to his chest, already standing.

"I should answer this," he gets out, heading away from her.

When Castle is trying to be secretive, he usually does a much better job than this.

She shakes off that thought, determined not to be unkind, and instead lets herself appreciate the strength of him - the width and solidity of his body - as he pushes through the door and into the break room. He tilts his head to brace his phone against his ear with a shoulder, and his hands reach for the espresso machine.

Mm, he loves her. He does love her.

Even with all this mess, and the struggle of not knowing what's real, and her own doubts fishing around in her guts, he's going to automatically make her coffee just to see her smile. And she will this time, she'll smile for him, because he deserves it. And she's so tired of frowning.

She blows out a long breath and goes back to surveillance video, searching for something or anything that might help. They don't have the 'truck' that dumped the body, if what Fletcher told them could be at all true, and they don't have anything that might suggest a body was dumped along this stretch. She'll have to widen her search, include more warehouses, more blocks; the thought of all that surveillance video is depressing.

Coffee sounds really great about now.

"Kate," he calls out.

She glances up and finds Castle striding through the bullpen, bearing down on her.

No coffee. Her frown presses deep before she can stop it, and Castle hisses her name once more, urgency in his tone.

It's late enough that the homicide floor is mostly clear, uniforms on Charlie shift, two detectives in the break room. She and Castle should have gone home hours ago, and she knows it.

"Just five more minutes-" she starts.

Castle reaches her desk and sinks into his chair, but she can tell it's not about the late hour. "Lanie called me."

"You?" she blurts out. Her guts twist. That was Lanie on the phone with him, Lanie who called him. And not her. After three hours of slippery _maybe, not sure, I don't know _texts from her friend.

"She was giving me a heads up; she didn't think it was right you be blindsided."

"Blindsided with what?" _Why couldn't she call me?_

"The toxicology reports came in on your doppelganger."

Kate winces; his eagerness for the more bizarre side of this case doesn't give her the confidence it used to. A month ago, they were jokes to make her smile, to prove how untrue the whole farce is. How little anyone is taking this seriously.

Now they have the hollow echo of truth.

Her twin. Her clone.

"What about the DNA?" she asks him.

"Nothing yet. But the toxicology - there's evidence from the tissue samples that the dead woman has been preserved."

"_Preserved_?"

"Remember the case with the body stored in the freezer - until the murderer quit paying the rent?"

"Right, I know. But Perlmutter didn't find signs of freezing."

"No, this woman was salted. Basically. Makes the flesh firmer, apparently."

"Salted flesh," she echoes, numbness in her lips that makes her sink back in her chair. "How long ago? When was-"

"Could be as long ago as five years."

The woman has been dead for five years. Five years ago was... "Before I was shot," she croaks.

No bullet wound scarring her chest.

"Y-yes."

Kate sinks her head into her hands, scrubs her face hard, lifts her chin once more. She can handle this. Think it through. Be logical. "This dead woman - going on the supposition that she's supposed to look like me, supposed to stand in for me somehow - it would have to be from a time before I was shot. Not recently. This - would be an _old_ plot falling through. Not a new one."

"Not Tyson," he says. She can see how he clutches the arms of the chair, the strain at the corners of his eyes. "Five years ago, an old plot. Tyson didn't show up until late October. He wouldn't have known us..."

"Did she say specifically five years?" Kate asks. "Did Lanie say that it was exactly five years ago?"

He gives a helpless shrug. "She said five, but if we're talking a month here and there - Perlmutter is supposed to call with the details. Officially."

She can't believe Lanie called him and not her, all because she doesn't remember a few broken toes? (It can't be true. She doesn't forget things; broken _toes_? Why would Lanie make it up? A dream that seemed so real that Lanie has pushed it into the forefront - but then her doppelganger has those same broken toes, and no dream can do that, make that up, invent it on the spot unless-)

"Kate, this will clear up. As soon as we get the results from the DNA test."

"Why didn't Lanie call _me_?" she hisses.

His face blanches.

"She thinks - what? That's I'm dead? That the woman on her table is me."

"Kate, I think she's just shaken. It's hard to know what - what is real with your face staring up at her from a dead woman."

"She's seen Tyson make perfect replicas of her and Espo. Why can't she-"

"Because those had defects going the other direction. And IDs. And you-"

"I can't prove I exist," she whispers.

"Can any of us?" he laughs, a little shaky, watching her like she might fall apart. She might.

"Sometimes I don't - think I even know. I searched for you for months, Castle, and then you came back like a gift - not even through any work of mine - and what if that's not real?" Kate presses her hand over her mouth as if she can stop it, but she can't stop it. "What if you're not you either? What if there's more to this-"

"I guess I can't say 100% that I'm me either," he admits. "Because I can't imagine - it is outside the scope of my understanding that I would leave you. For anything. So maybe _I _didn't leave you. Maybe he did."

"To protect us," she tries flimsily. It's such a tired excuse; everything is so tired.

"But Kate, every night we close our eyes and go to sleep, there's no guarantee we aren't someone else when we wake up. And if you think about it, with that gap of unconsciousness, it is a kind of miracle that we are. Now I lay me down to sleep."

"I never had to distrust my own sleep before. Or pray to keep my _soul._"

"Well, then, character development," he keeps going, rushing into her void for her. "You're not the same woman you were five years ago, and thank God for that, because _you _married me. Five years ago Kate couldn't have done that, wouldn't."

"She did though," she mutters, chewing on the inside of her lip. A habit of a lifetime ago dredged up for tonight.

"But I'm not the same as I was five years ago either," he insists. "Trauma and tragedy, joy and laughter - those things have changed us. We aren't the same people. We're all doppelgangers, living out new versions of ourselves, like former worms walking around with moth wings on."

Her heart trips at those words, _moth wings_, and how her mother said, _don't touch them, Katie, they're nothing more than dust and powder; you don't want to take their magic_. And she remembers the great king moth and its staring eyespots glaring at her from the kitchen window, battling for the light inside, so angry at being abandoned.

"Not butterflies?" she murmurs.

"I'm pretty, but I'm not that pretty," he says.

She laughs and takes her first deep breath since his phone rang.

"Do you ever wonder about me?" she says.

And he hesitates a fraction too long.

* * *

She isn't intending to snoop, but she is a detective, and he makes it easy. It's like he wants her to find it.

He was messing with his phone for so long, and his face was so guilt-stricken in that one instant, that she confiscates his device the moment he falls asleep beside her.

She knows his passcode to unlock the screen, but she finds a secret thrill in carefully arranging her body to his so that she can maneuver his thumb to the bottom and unlock it with his own forensics.

She's warm and sated and heavy with the need for sleep, but she moves through his different home screens, his wide assortment of games, the alerts on various messaging apps, the bright red 23 indicating new emails he's ignoring (it's the Black Pawn account, she thinks), and finally to the end.

She double-presses the menu button and it fades the screen to give her just those floating displays of all of his open programs. She dismisses Starbucks and the pharmacy, the email program and the messaging app, and then the alarm and the streaming radio. Last in line is the notepad and she taps the screen to call it up.

He's made a list. Of her. He's comparing her, then and now.

_Beckett Before_

She reads his list, whatever this Before version of herself is supposed to be, and she can't identify herself, not as she knows herself to be. Some of these befores are clearly from their first year working together (_control freak, no touching, bland wardrobe choices, hair, banned for rifling thru her mother's case)_ and even though it shouldn't sting, it does.

So does _no touching, careful mental balance i.e. no black hole, justice has no wiggle room _and _scathing sexual confidence_.

She knows she shouldn't keep reading; she knows it will only hurt. But she can't bear to know the before version of herself without knowing the after. How he sees her now, whoever she is, the original of Beckett or the cheap imitation.

_Kate After_

He has a note at the top of this delineation. (It's not a Pros and Cons, at least there is that; she keeps reminding herself that it's not like he loves one version of her better. Character evolution - he said that.) His badly autocorrected text says: _Is it because I have seen more, deeper, to the heart of her? Is Beckett Before only my skewed view of what I wanted to see for Nikki Heat, while Kate is the true woman who could never be completely revealed to an asshole like I was?_

Am, she thinks bitterly.

But it helps, somewhat; it eases the ache of _careful mental balance_ that was a punch to the gut (because it's not true; she was so on the edge, she was teetering and he didn't even need to push, he barely grazed her shoulder and she fell so far, so fast).

And then she goes ahead and reads the list, her Kate After version, the one that ought to be really and most real herself, the wife of her husband.

_Kate After: carefree, malleable sexual confidence - experience without certainty, student-like, eager to be creative, uninhibited_

Kate presses his phone down to her chest, heart floundering, and she wonders if that's right, if she seems childish in her craving for him, the need that feels incessant one night and disappears the next because of images in her head, or wounds to her heart.

She turns her head to look at him, so very close, that pleased smile even in his sleep. She knows he _likes_ it, but why does it surprise him? Why does his Kate After seem a revelation when she teased him constantly, when he entranced her with simply and only his fingers petting her hand?

Sex. Sex is his defining line? He has _no idea _what sex with her might have been like that first year, and that should've occurred to him when he was making this damn list.

She snags the phone and props it up, has to angrily swipe across the screen and unlock it with the passcode because it's gone to sleep, and the thrill is gone for forensics. The list resolves and his Kate After record starts stacking up the tallies in her favor (or against; she can't even tell):

_unending, merciful compassion; unwilling to compromise the truth; so easily wounded but heals stronger, more compassionate, with a deeper well of understanding for someone like me and more than I should ever deserve._

_Who is Kate Beckett? Neither Nikki Heat nor Stepford wife, not one thing; possibly all things, the gamut of the characteristics' paradox. I don't know Kate; I only know a limited version of Kate - wife, love, partner. She is daughter, friend, will she be mother or sister or I don't even know? She will always have one more layer I haven't peeled, another mystery beneath the mystery. _

While it's beautiful, somehow, it also gives her heart an ache that feels both right and terrible at the same time. She's not After and she's not Before, she is some cuckoo creature still molting, becoming something she doesn't know yet, neither of them can predict.

And if he doesn't know her, who will possibly believe she's herself?

She's not sure she believes herself any more either.


	10. Chapter 10

**Fetch**

* * *

"Unmitigated disaster," Castle sighs, closing their front door behind him. He drops the mail onto the side table and won't look at her.

She nods, swallowing hard. That did not go well. "I have a headache," she murmurs, swiping at her eyes. No tears, at least there is that.

"Again?" he says.

She glances up and he's studying her. She avoids his eyes and sheds her coat. "It's just - this case," she says.

"Right." He offers her the kind of smile she can see right through. "This case. How about a glass of wine?"

She nods and he heads immediately for the wine fridge in the kitchen, so she follows, steps up to the cabinets and opens one, takes down two thin glasses, delicate. Everything precious is fragile. Why hasn't anything been made to last?

"Lanie won't talk to me again," she says finally.

"Lanie is - confused. Or-" _you are._

"I _know_ I got my tonsils out," she blurts out. Her face flames up.

"Hey, I know," he says easily. Wine is being decanted just that fast. "You told me the story. Temptation Lane."

"Yes, but that's circumstantial," she growls.

Castle winces. "I'm sure Lanie didn't mean it like that."

"I'm trying to do my job here, but Perlmutter takes glee in making it difficult, and then Lanie _helps_ him."

"They're trying to do their jobs too, Kate." He hands her the glass and she takes a sip, but almost immediately her headache redoubles. She sets it on the counter and makes herself stand up straighter, but it doesn't help.

Castle ignores his own glass and steps into her, pushes his fingers through her hair to knead her skull. She moans and drops her head to his shoulder, slumping. Heat and touch, the familiar. She knows _him_. Somehow that should be enough.

"You can call your dad; ask him about it. Even if the medical records are incomplete or missing, he'd know-"

"It's just one thing after another, Castle. I'm so tired."

"I know," he says. Arms around her, like he hasn't made a list on his phone debating which version of her is true. She hasn't brought it up; she can't. She knows him; she clings to that. Knowing him makes her known.

He's still here, right? So what does it matter if he likes to invent stories for every contingency? What does it matter at all. Harmless. "You should write this into Nikki Heat," she mutters.

He stiffens.

Oh, that _is _what he's doing. That feels so much better.

She lifts her head and smiles at him. "Be interesting, right? And a kind of tribute to your earlier work. All those witches and ghosts and supernatural murders."

"Oh, yeah," he says, ease flowing back into him. His hands rub up and down her arms. "You're right. Would be fun to get back to that kind of writing. You've read even the witches?"

"Mm, of course," she says. "I told you that."

He chuckles. "You most certainly did not."

She frowns, ready to remind him, but a dull ache has set up behind her eyes and she rubs the bridge of her nose. "I guess I'll call my dad. Will look through the mail, see if the lab sent out results? Supposed to be here last week."

"Yeah. Hey, why don't you take a hot shower? Help the headache. Wine will be waiting when you're done."

"Maybe so." She wanders away from him, feeling somehow lost.

Lost in her own skin.

* * *

As a freshman in high school, Kate Beckett was determined to be a doctor. Mostly because it meant not being a lawyer like her parents. She took Biology I and Biology II and Anatomy &amp; Physiology; she dissected starfish (seastars) and annelids and a fetal pig. When Lanie does her autopsies and pulls back muscle tissue and disorganizes organs in the body cavity, Beckett has uncomfortable flashbacks to identifying the minute squiggle of an amphibian gallbladder.

So she knows strange, fluttering facts from four years of biology classes, and they rise up at inopportune times.

For instance. When a certain kind of species - say a coral reef - reproduces, it creates nothing more than a clone. _Budding_. The daughter remains attached at the site, growing like a Siamese twin against her mother's side. The coral's daughter breaks off only when it matures, and it leaves behind discernible scar tissue_._

Kate brushes her fingers along the neat line at her side, can almost imagine pushing into her chest cavity and interdigitating her ribs, tickling her heart as she strains to reach. Or the place between her breasts, slightly off-center, a puckered mouth like a mother's good-bye kiss. She has scars; she has budded from the woman she used to be into this here and now.

But another form of asexual reproduction is fragmentation. It's worse, and not just because it seems more violent somehow. Fragmentation leaves no room for _original._ The one is broken into the many - _I am Legion -_ by a hapless diver or a hurricane, and each of those coral chunks, less than the whole, hunkers down and attempts to regrow, recreate its natural state, pushing out into the sea, realigning its body to match the plan it knows by instinct and perhaps by heart, _how it is supposed to be_.

The coral reforms, but now there are four. All equal. All their own. All harboring the private thought, _this is the real me; this is who I am._

Kate drops her fingers from her scars, from those places where she's been broken, and she finally pulls her pajamas on over her head. The shirt drops into place and she stares into the bathroom mirror, studying her own eyes, every striation, like the fruit bud of an orange, or the rings of a tree, something that marks history and time and experience.

_This is the real me._

She sees her life reflected in those lines. Outer-most layer: the gunshot and teeth-gritting recovery, the heated _I just want you_, the flare of lightning, the wash of smoke and firehose and grief, the three months of obsessive searching, the return, the marriage in the morning sun, the cowboy chaps and snake rattler of a honeymoon, even Kelly Nieman is there, the dark blade of fear.

But there are inner layers, tightly compacted: her mother's murder, her father's drinking, Police Academy, training officer, and her first fatal shooting. Somewhere between those two demarcations - Castle and her mother - are the events of a blurred, waiting life. A life on hold, the accretion of experience and emotion, the phases of a bland childhood, budding.

It's all there.

Even if her father's voice on the phone was confused when he answered her: _No, Kate, you didn't get your tonsils out._

But Temptation Lane, but her mother's body against hers on the couch, but the smell of melting ice cream in a bowl, but the half-drugged nights.

_No, Kate, you never had your tonsils out._

She closes her eyes, every thought a struggle, a fight, a denial. But then she opens them again and leaves the bathroom.

And comes across Castle standing at the window, hands in his pockets, shoulders up near his ears.

He looks wrecked. He startles at the sound of her.

"It's just me," she says. She was going for a statement, bold and persuasive and defiant, but it comes out a little broken. _Who is me?_

Would the real Kate Beckett have broken, fragmented?

The real Kate Beckett _is_ broken, fragmented. Permanently. The real Kate Beckett is on a slab in the morgue, no gunshot wound but all the right DNA. Or so says the letter in her husband's hand, the letter from the lab. _Sample A is a familial match to Sample B. Sample B is a familial match - though degraded - to Sample C._

Here's a perfect problem from her Biology exam: if sample B is degraded, what does that make her, the woman of Sample B?

Rick turns around, face so lined with grief that it makes her heart clench, makes her step back with the force of it.

"It's you." _But you're not her._

Because Kate Beckett is dead.

And she is the impostor.


	11. Chapter 11

**Fetch**

* * *

The room is bare but for the exam table, a padded metal chair, and a sink. A narrow window overlooks a shadowed alley; it has stopped snowing outside, and grey slush slurries the sewer system, melts on rooftops.

The heat must be broken.

She presses her arms in against her ribs and holds her elbows, breathing slowly to stem the panic that still threatens to well up any time she lowers her defenses. The plastic sticks to her bare thighs, air drifts over her back where the hospital gown hasn't been tied all the way. Holding herself in doesn't seem to work.

A week ago, Kate would have disdained the clinic's rules and jumped off the exam table, padded barefoot to the chair, and pulled on her jeans under the hospital gown.

But she's not Kate. Not certainly, anyway.

She's not certain of anything.

The fluorescent light over her head whines at a pitch both annoying and disconcerting (_can everyone hear that or is it just me? is this one more way in which I'm not like-)_

The door opens and she sits up stiffly, holding her elbows against her sides, but it's Rick Castle who slips through and shuts the exam room door. He leans against it with a wide-eyed look, hair ruffled so that his bangs are askew. Her fingers twitch at her elbows, wanting.

"You won't _believe_ the hassle they put me through out there," he whispers.

"What," she says tonelessly. Her heels bump against the wood frame of the exam table with the pulse of her blood in her veins, the curl of panic that rises up again. She wants, wants so much, wants this life, but it's not hers to take. It's the dead woman's.

"Whew, I made it," he says, striding towards her. "Insurance forms, eesh. But they can't keep me out with their endless monotony of questions."

She shivers, eyes sliding to the blank grey outside the window.

His fingers touch the bare skin at her back. "You look like you're freezing," he says, dropping all pretense of humor. "A hospital gown. In this day and age, you'd think they'd have invented something with a little more dignity. Or at least without gaping holes."

He begins retying the back, his fingers warm and heavy, a little clumsy in that way of his. She turns her head to look at him.

His gaze is resolute, knowing. "It's going to be okay, Kate."

He still calls her that. She can't meet his eyes when he does, and that tight knot, low in her belly, constricts a little more.

They were supposed to have babies.

"Stop that," he murmurs, his fingers tracing the line of her vertebrae and down. "Stop, Kate Beckett. This can all be explained."

"I could really - really use one of your crazy theories about now," she says tightly.

He lets out a long breath, his chin coming to rest on the back of her head before he places a kiss on her hair she can't even feel. "I'm not sure my coping skills are exactly your coping skills, Beckett. No more of my stupid, wild stories-"

"I like your stories," she gets out. Needs them. Something.

He's silent for so long that she closes her eyes, despair washing so keenly through her that she must make some sound because he's catching her shoulders.

"Hey, a story? You want a crazy theory? Sure, sure, I can do that, Kate. There's the one where aliens really did abduct us from the side of the road, _and_ they accidentally killed Maria the astrophysicist when she was shunted into space, but when they returned us, they made these perfect copies that they could probe in peach-"

Kate groans, her head coming up, and he's giving her that _please smile back at me_ smile.

"Or there's the one where you're from one of those alternate universes I managed to see a glimpse of. A few small inconsistencies with this one. You touched the artifact and wished for the perfect life, and here you are, our perfect life."

"You and Ryan come up with that one?" She tries to chuckle but it sounds strangled.

He strokes a hand down her hair. "No, Ryan came up with the one where you had an evil twin snatched at birth, but I told him that was lame."

She shivers. "And where did I - she - go?"

"What do you mean?"

"When I took her place, when the universes shifted, and I stepped into her perfect life-" Oh God, it is perfect, isn't it? It's perfect and she's going to lose it. It doesn't belong to her.

"I don't know where she went. She slipped into another universe stream so long ago. Before she - you - could admit you were hopelessly in love me," he sighs, a flourish of drama. "But then her reality lost hold of her, or she found the artifact on her side of things and she reappeared, voila, and then - matter can be neither created nor destroyed. That's a fact. The universe can't handle two Becketts so smart and tall and sexy. So. She was destroyed in transit."

Kate blinks and lifts a hand, swiping fast a tear, and Castle cups the side of her face and pulls her in gently. His fingers bury in her hair at the back of her skull, rubbing softly. She lays her cheek to his shoulder and watches the grey world outside the narrow window, thinking about the other Kate, original or not, clone or alien replicant or a chip off the coral block, she doesn't know.

The door clicks in warning before it opens, giving Kate just enough time to jerk upright, stiff and swiping the wetness from her cheeks. Castle stays standing just before her, a shield until she can gather herself, and the nurse comes in with her chart.

"Are you ready, Detective?"

She swallows and nods, but she's not ready for the truth. She doesn't want to know.

She wants _this_ life. The life she's taken.

* * *

Castle races her back to the exam room and hands over her pile of clothes. She slowly pulls her jeans back up her legs, buttoning them, focusing all her energy on the act of dressing.

Without her realizing, Castle has moved behind her in the small room and begins untying the laces of the hospital gown. His thumbs brush lightly over her back and she drops her hands, swaying with the touch of him.

"Hospital gowns are not supposed to be sexy, but somehow you make it work."

She just feels numb. She wants the day to be over; she wants to go home. But she feels a stranger there again, a supplanter.

He combs her hair aside, kisses the nape of her neck with his fingers warm at her throat. "You going to talk to me, Kate?"

"About what?" She rouses and slides off the hospital gown, shrugs on her bra. Castle helps, his fingers at the straps more shockingly arousing than really helpful, but then she manages the camisole on top of it and feels better.

Clothes in layers like armor.

He untangles her hair from her sweater as it comes over her head, and then he moves back around so he's facing her, confronting her. "About any of this. The MRI, the last few weeks, my crazy theories - _this_ theory - anything."

She shrugs, pushing her hands into her jeans pockets to look for her wedding band.

But they're empty. She has a moment's terrible grief, so sharp she can't breathe, but Castle holds up the ring in his thumb and finger. "Married, remember? Married people tell each other things."

"I don't feel like an alien replicant," she says. She's stunned still when he takes her hand and pushes her ring on her finger.

"Wow, that was the _least_ convincing statement that I've ever heard." He shakes his head and catches her arms, tugging her closer. She's still barefoot, and his chin comes to the top of her head. "Besides I was thinking the other direction - _she's _the alien replicant. But maybe you feel more like the terminator? Shapeshifting cyborg from the future. That would be cool."

"I wish," she murmurs. Instead of some kind of - what? She wishes there was something plausible about any of this, about having a lab report that says she has degraded DNA that's a familial match to her father and to the dead woman - but no clear line of descendance. Could be anything, could be sisters, twins, could be her mother was never truthful-

No, not that. Of anything, that seems the most impossible. Her mother can't be called into question, not when everything else shifts under her feet. Her mother is the truth.

"If you were a cyborg from the future then-"

The door clicks open and Kate startles, practically out of his arms, but he moves to stand right beside her, shoulder to shoulder. She glances at him instead of the woman coming through the door, the fine lines around his eyes that hold such grief for her despite the wild stories.

For her. For Kate. For whoever it is, whichever it is.

The doctor opens up a file and lays it on the plastic exam table so that the paper crinkles. Her hands are brown and sure and strong; they hold some mystery that Kate can't solve. When she lifts her head, it's purely business professional. She doesn't look like she cares if she's talking to a replicant.

"The blood work is prelim - but our techs aren't finding the same results as your independent lab. A bit of anemia, which might affect their processes, perhaps, but not to the extent this report shows. Be wary of independent labs, especially if they keep telling you they can run another expensive test to come up with 'better answers' for you. It can be a racket."

"It can?" That's completely disingenuous.

Castle's hand comes to tangle with hers, a quick squeeze. "That's a good sign, right?"

"Anemia is easy to treat. We'll monitor you, Ms. Beckett, for six weeks at least. Now for the MRI."

Kate stiffens, drawing herself up as much as she can, wishing she had stepped into her shoes.

"Looks like your suspicions were correct, Mr Castle. I'll get a second opinion, but we should go ahead and take steps for care. It must have been a rather vicious head injury, a close contact fight, and we don't want long-term effects."

Castle squeezes her hand again.

The doctor levels Kate with a look, as if she's the culprit in this for letting it go on so long. "You're lucky your husband insisted you come in. A concussion is a serious injury."

A concussion. It seems so simple.

If that's her answer, then why does she feel like a stranger?


	12. Chapter 12

**Fetch**

* * *

"How are you feeling, Detective?"

Kate plasters on a weak smile and scrapes her hair back from her temples with a hand. "Really, I feel fine, Captain."

"Mr Castle said the MRI was quite impressive."

She swallows and bobs her head in agreement, giving Castle a sidelong glance. He was here this morning ahead of her; apparently he thinks it's his job to inform the world that she's not crazy, not a clone, she's just _damaged._

"Since it has been so long since she was injured," Castle injects, "they did the MRI instead of just a cheaper CT scan."

"It was that bad?" Gates says, crossing her arms in front of her. She's wearing those glasses that remind Kate of a school teacher she had in fifth grade, always looking down her nose at them.

"Apparently so," Kate sighs. She still can't reconcile everything; she still feels out of place in her own skin. "But I feel fine." Right.

"Well, be that as it may, persistent headaches, your memory confusion, changes in speech-"

"Speech?" she blurts out, stunned.

Gates and Castle share looks, and she sinks to the chair before Gates's desk, blindsided. A concussion over six weeks old, and her _speech_ patterns changed? Her memories were jumbled and her _speech _was affected? Why did no one say anything, why didn't Castle - picky and nosy as he is - not even make a joke about it?

After the MRI, the doctor told her, _no, Ms Beckett, you were right._ She's had her tonsils out at some point, but she must have long ago jumbled the stories in her head. Rose-colored glasses when it comes to her mother, and she knows she does that, paints this idyllic picture, but she could have sworn.

But it was after her appendix was taken out. Her tonsils, she's discovered, happened so early that it slipped her father's mind. He called her after the clinic - she thinks Castle prompted it - and he told her, _oh Katie, I forgot. You were two years old, lots of strep, the doctor took them out. Barely put a dent in you; it must have slipped my mind._

Her father has been doing that lately, forgetting things. Not senile dementia forgetting, no, just mixing things up, going blank as if it suits him. A version of selective hearing. When he had dinner with them and Castle's mother, Kate told the story about her father insisting upon her high school graduation that she have those three essential items for every woman: a little black dress, a strand of pearls, and a watch. When she looked over the table at her father, Jim just shook his head. _Sounds like me. And well, I gave you the watch, though perhaps I wasn't being the best father to you at that moment._

And Castle, smoothing it over, _Don't worry, Jim, I've taken care of the pearls._

Kate, able to chuckle, still a little incredulous that he forgot a rule she felt was so pivotal to her professional appearance, said, _I took care of the little black dress. So I'm covered. _

Captain Gates lets out a soft noise. "I see, Mr Castle. Well, Detective, if you feel taxed, or the headaches get worse, you ought to think about going down to half-days-"

"No, sir," she jumps up, furious and trying to handle it with grace. She swallows and releases her fists. "I'm fine, sir. I don't need to go home."

"Oh, no? You just spent the last few minute wool-gathering. You're completely fine."

Kate flushes and turns a quick glance to Castle, but he winces. Damn. "Yes, sir, I understand that - it's a real thing. I do realize. But I can do the work. I'm not brain-damaged, just-"

"Just a _lesion_," Castle huffs. He wasn't happy about her blithe insistence on coming into work despite the diagnosis. To her way of thinking, a concussion explains a few things but it doesn't resolve their issues.

There's still a dead woman with her _face_ on that table. Her face, and her broken toes (that must have actually happened, must have), and her medical records. A woman they can't ID.

"I take the health of the detectives under me very seriously," Captain Gates says. "And you, Detective Beckett, have been walking around in a fog the last month. This has shaken you. Shaken all of us, I know, seeing your own face on a victim. But-"

"No, sir, I understand that," she says, dipping her chin in acknowledgement. "But I'll still be following doctor's orders sitting at my desk as I would be sitting at home."

Gates eyes her critically and then turns to Castle, addressing him. "Could they pinpoint when-?"

"No, sir," Castle says, sounding mournful. Like it's _his_ fault she has a brain lesion from a concussion no one knew about. "No, sir, but the doctor at the neurology clinic told us it could have been last _year_."

"Last year?" Gates says, eyebrows picking up.

"Or even longer," Castle says, really playing it up, the traitor.

"An old injury?" Gates's eyes narrow and she shoots Kate an assessing look. "That fight with the sniper - you took him on yourself. You were black and blue, had to be, after that. He threw you off a roof and did you even receive medical attention?"

"That was _years_ ago," she protests.

"Those goons," Castle blurts out, his eyes scared. "At the motel that you - I found you stumbling down the hall about to pass out. There was blood - blood all over you, Kate, where Bracken's guys smashed a bottle over your head. I should have taken you to a hospital."

Gates flashes her a look. "This is beginning to sound alarming."

"Sir, I've had my share of scrapes, that's true," she says carefully. "But as Castle said, the - lesion - is old. It's an old injury. But the concussion and its symptoms are current. New. So - sometime this year, Castle, and _not _from getting smashed over the head."

"In October, there was that invisible man - well, woman - who slammed you into-"

"Castle," she hisses, shooting him a glare.

She doesn't want to admit how that hurts, rattles her brain, doesn't want to admit that she's found herself less sharp, less on point lately.

"Put me on desk duty. It's plenty restrictive," she says finally, turning her eyes on the Captain. She won't beg; she won't. "You've already taken me off every other case, my desk is practically clear. But I have one more victim who needs justice."

Gates watches her thoughtfully.

Kate ignores Castle and whatever puppy-pleading he's doing behind her. She's not losing this one; she keeps her eyes on her boss.

"All right, Detective. Desk duty. Do _not_ chase down leads - you send out Ryan to do the footwork. Mr Castle? That means you too. Deskbound."

Castle eagerly straightens up. "Aye-aye, sir."

Gates flashes him a scornful glance. "Do not mock the seriousness of this discussion, Mr Castle, with your-"

"No, sir, I apologize. I only meant to express my heartfelt appreciation of your consideration. After all, a concussion is a serious injury."

Kate growls. She's had _enough_ of him, she really has, parroting everything the neurological doctor told them. "Castle, why don't you have a talk with your new best friend, find out what Lanie knows about our compromised lab work?" Kate says, nearly gritting her teeth. "I've got _paper_work to do."

And she dismisses herself from the Captain's office, ready to solve this case.

Lesion or no.


	13. Chapter 13

**Fetch**

* * *

The morning stretches across the horizon, obscured though it is by grimy concrete and grey edifice. The compromise of the city. She wishes there were birds in the sky, wishes she could watch mindlessly as the starlings swing and swirl in their indecisive spirographs. But that was the cabin. Not here. Not in the city.

Kate has been awake for hours now, too long to count, sitting at the bar with coffee that hasn't yet stirred her blood, wishing for things.

A rumble from behind is her only warning before a warm body enfolds her, arms and bristled face against her neck and the dark musk of sleep carried on his clothes. He kisses her mouth with a laziness that makes her sluggish body finally take notice, and she lifts an arm to circle his neck and upper shoulder.

"Morning, babe," she murmurs, receiving a second kiss with a smile and duck of her chin as he tries to tickle her neck.

He straightens, rubs his palm down her arm. "Morning. Sheets were cold. You been up long?"

"Long enough," she sighs. She's about to elaborate - because she knows she should and because he's worrying over her a lot more these days - but her phone vibrates jerkily on the kitchen counter, manic in its attention-getting, no dulcet tones to warn her of who might be calling.

Castle scoops it up for her and hands it over with a raised eyebrow. "It's Lanie."

Her jaw actually drops, but she answers with that rush of _please please please_ that tells her she's still not in control of herself, in control of her messy grief for a woman she ought to be but isn't.

"Kate?" the voice on the other end asks. Is it because Lanie's not sure of her any more, or is it because just the tremor in her voice that sounds a warning. Kate doesn't know. Is she even sure?

"Lanie?"

"I'm sorry I haven't gotten to my phone before now, but girl, you are gonna _love _me."

Kate blinks, entirely thrown by her friend's direction. "For - what? Why? I've been trying to reach you for a week. You called _Castle_-"

It's spilling out rather ignobly, and Castle rests his hand on her drawn-up knee as if in warning. Or maybe just sympathy. He knows her, whoever she is, whatever she is, however brain-damaged she's gotten, and that's a comfort.

"I know, but I had - there was something going on. Look, do you want to know what I've found for you or what?"

"Found for me?"

"In this case," Lanie says, drawing out each word as if Kate is stupid. "Your case, Beckett. I know what happened to her. Our Kate Doe. I know what happened."

_Kate Doe?_ she mouths to Castle. He must have heard the loud-talking Lanie anyway, because his eyes widen in comic horror. Uh-huh, she figured that came from him. "Lanie. Come on then. Don't leave me in suspense."

"Okay, so some background - that body preservation was just so specific and - well, rather outdated. So I was thinking some kind of weird religious ritual, I don't know, something. I put out a few feelers, asked some questions of a forensic pathologist."

"And?"

"And at first there was nothing. Puzzled looks, scratching heads, all of them with _yes, yes, this is interesting. _But no real help."

Kate wants to throttle Lanie over the phone line. Castle is giving her this excited, almost-thrilled look like he knows what Lanie has been up to.

"Then I heard from a friend in Connecticut who works with a medical supply company, and all the pieces started to fall into place. So I called your boy, Castle, and told him what I was doing, and I went up there and poked around, asked some questions."

Kate's eyes startle to Castle. He cringes, but he's leaning forward on his elbows, obviously in on this.

"That's where I've been and why I didn't call you back right away - because I finally _got_ something, Kate. I know what happened. And I found our guy."

"You _what_?" Lanie isn't even armed. She can't be confronting murderers. What the hell?

"You need to come down here. I have him here, and you need to talk to him."

"At the morgue? Right now?"

"Right now. He's got to be on shift in two hours, Beckett. Get moving."

"Work-?" But Lanie ends the call without even saying good-bye. Kate lowers her phone to the granite counter and stares up at Castle for a heartbeat too long. And then it hits her. "Lanie has been investigating this behind my back? And you?"

"No, of course not. Not behind your back. She had a few inquiries in to medically-minded people, and then it just kind of snowballed, and then you were - different - and so-"

"I was different," she says stiffly. "A clone. An alien-"

"No, Kate. No. It was just - well, I think we all knew it was affecting you. Seeing her face - your face. You think Lanie doesn't know how that feels? She wanted to help. She went looking. And I guess she found something?"

Kate nods shortly, everything churned up in her again after she fought so hard this morning for peace, for peace. Just - a breath that feels her own in lungs that belong only to her, a mind not crowded with memories made shaky by a blow to the head.

Funny. It really might have been Tyson after all, that fight with Nieman.

"Kate?"

She shakes it off. "Lanie wants us at the morgue. She has someone there."

* * *

Lanie doesn't even greet them; she just points towards the viewing room where family members usually wait for the sheet to be pulled back. "He's in there."

"Did he confess?" Kate asks, hand moving to her hip where her gun is holstered. Concussed, desked, but not demoted.

"Of a sort." Lanie glances back to her little office space carved from the anteroom of the autopsy suite. Her laptop is up and bright. "I'm waiting on something, so you go on in."

Kate lifts an eyebrow in askance, but Castle is moving towards the viewing room before she can voice her suspicions. She follows because she has the gun, and because she's ready for answers, no matter the drama. She didn't even shower; her hair is pulled back at her nape and tendrils keep escaping. She shoves another back behind her ear in frustration, but she reaches for the door knob and wrenches it open.

Castle is at her back so that she's first, as always. The man inside is a cop, a police officer in uniform, and when he turns his head at her entrance, he curses and jumps to his feet, his own hand moving to his weapon. "Holy mother of God!"

Kate draws her gun, but he doesn't - pausing instead with one hand at his hip, the other raising slowly above his head. His face is white but Castle behind her seems to shift awareness in his eyes.

"Sorry, you - surprised me." He raises both hands.

"Surprised you?" Castle says. Kate slowly lowers her gun.

"You look a lot like her." The officer shakes his head, gives a rough noise. "You look _exactly_ like her."

"Who are you?" Kate snaps. She feels Castle nudging at her back, pushing to get in through the door, and she reluctantly steps forward.

"I'm Officer Banim. John Banim, ma'am-"

"Detective," she says shortly, striding smoothly towards the center of the room. "Beckett. Tell me about the dead woman."

"Well, I... Dr Parish said you found her in the river?" He shakes his head and presses the heels of his hands into his temples. He has two widow's peaks of curly dark hair, receding inevitably towards his crown, and his eyes are narrow set. His nose is severe, though his mouth is a small bud atop a jutting chin. With unkempt sideburns, he's nothing more than a man of indiscriminate middle age.

He sits abruptly on the bench once more, staring in the distance. And now he definitely looks older. His mouth is slightly parted like he's having trouble finding words.

"Officer Banim?" she says, trying to recall him to his professional duty.

"Right. The river. I suppose that makes sense. Fell off the boat or jostled during loading-"

"Fell off the _boat_?" Rick says, indignant for the dead woman. The Kate Doe. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Kate steps in front of Castle to block Officer Banim's line of sight to him, keep control of the interrogation. "Why don't you start at the beginning, Officer?"

The man straightens up, the uniform lines still starched, the beginning of his shift. "Yes, ma'am. I'm attached to the 9th, Detective Beckett, and my partner and I usually get B&amp;E calls, domestic disputes. Not much else. I've never had to shoot a man. Never."

She flares her nostrils in frustration, but Castle moves to sit on the bench against the other wall, his very presence reminding her that there's a story here, and she has to be patient.

"Well, this time, we got a call at the 1600 block of-"

The door swings open and Kate growls, turning her head to see Lanie hurrying inside. She has a couple of printouts in her hand, waving them in the air. "Beckett, I got it right here. Just had the Ninth send over Officer Banim's police report. I knew you'd need it right in front of you to believe this. Did he tell you-?"

Kate rolls her eyes, but she takes the pages. "He hasn't even gotten to the report. Go ahead, Officer. You responded to a call?" She glances down at the police report, taking note of Banim's signature on the bottom, scanning as he speaks.

"Like I said we got the call, indigent in a doorway, but when we went to roust, the girl was dead. She-"

"This is my apartment," Kate croaks, staring down at the address.

"What?" Castle says, jumping to his feet. He's right at her side, peering over her shoulder.

She stares at the neatly typed address. "I mean - my old apartment building. The one that was bombed," she mutters, flipping through to the next page, reading quickly.

"I don't know about that, ma'am. No bombs. But this woman was in the vestibule, like she'd gotten in the security door, for warmth, but she died there, waiting to get in. It was cold the night before-"

The police report is dated January 9th. Her skin crawls. Coincidence. There are only so many days of the year; it's bound to happen.

"So we called for a bus and kinda poked around. She didn't have a coat, no ID, just pants and a shirt, and she had curled up tight in the corner, probably trying to conserve warmth. She was really clean, that's what surprised me. Her hair was - pretty." Officer Banim blushes and glances away from her. "I'm never gonna forget that face. That... your face, Detective. I don't know, but you got a fetch."

Kate lifts an eyebrow. "A what?"

Castle makes a noise. "An Irish spirit - doppelganger, right? Supposed to be the spirit of a person."

"My family's Irish, something my grandma always said. You got a fetch. A ghost, and if you saw yours, well... you were marked."

Kate frowns. "I'm not interested in ghost stories, Officer Banim. You called for an ambulance and then how did this woman get in the river?"

He blushes again and his head dips down. "Homeless, you know, and we did a check for missing persons from the squad car but we got nothing. So the paramedics, I know one of them - he moonlights for a medical supply company. The ones that provide dead bodies for teaching hospitals and forensic studies."

"I see," Castle says. His eyes are stark, flint. "So you guys just agreed to - redirect the body. Never mind what family might come looking for her, might want to find her."

"She was homeless and it's not like it was a homicide and... yeah. We divvied up the finder's fee." Officer Banim hangs his head. "I know you gotta report this. I know you do."

Castle gives a growl that makes Kate startle towards him, holding up her arm to block his advance. Her eyes snag his and the bleak despair on his face turns her to stone.

He jerks his head and stalks towards the door, but he doesn't leave. Lanie stays where she is, glancing between them.

"Castle," Kate says quietly.

His shoulders hunch, but he does turn back to her. "She has your face."

Kate lets out a slow breath. Lanie steps into the breach, gesturing to the police officer from the Ninth. "The medical supply company is located on the Hudson, just upriver from where our Kate Doe was found. They store cadavers in a refrigerated and salted storage unit and then ship them to a teaching hospital in Connecticut. Only the hospital, when they received their shipment, noted they were missing a body. The medical supply company simply shipped a replacement. No one realized."

Kate shakes her head. "But how did _you_ realize all this, Lanie?"

"I asked around about the salt preserving, because it's not widely used. But it turns out the medical supply industry does it sometimes when they intake cadavers of a - well, perhaps questionable nature."

"Black market is what it is," Castle says sharply.

Kate glances to him, her heart wrung by the look on his face, but she can't find anything to say to that.

Officer Banim stands up. "I am truly sorry, Detective Beckett. Was she your sister?"

Kate closes her eyes, realizes that for all the blanks they've filled in, questions answered, there is still that.

_Who?_

A dead woman who looks like her. Who died at her old apartment building. Who has her features, her once-broken bones, her lack of tonsils-

Her husband's grief.

She lets out a breath. "Yeah," she says finally. "Yeah, you could say that."


	14. Epilogue

**Fetch**

* * *

Castle takes her hand just outside the gate. It's only the hook of his fingers through her own, like he won't try to guide her, he'll only make this bare hint of a claim.

Her headache returned the moment she stood up this morning, and she's trying to ignore it. She has an MRI scheduled tomorrow and she hopes these last few weeks of rest and desk duty will have healed the lesion. She's desperate to get back to a full case load.

She's not sure she'll be cleared. She's morbid this afternoon. She knows that. She's trying not to see symbolism in the grey-domed sky or the dead winter grass. Or the almost non-touch she and Castle have as they walk through the wrought-iron gate of the cemetery.

Her father isn't happy with her.

She offered to buy the plot outright, but it wasn't the money. At least, Kate doesn't think it was the money. In the end, he allowed the third plot to be used. Can her father really have expected she would want to be buried on her mother's other side, the three of them in death as they were in life? Dark and cold and separated by earth.

Her eyes skim and skip over the headstones marking the slow rise of the knoll, and past that, past that is her mother's grave.

And now Kate's.

"You didn't have to do this," she tells him.

"I feel like she deserves it. Dying alone in the cold..."

_In your old building._

She swallows and nods, because she knows they both wonder. Of course they do; they've seen too much, and Castle is a natural believer in the unexplained. Mostly to wind her up, but he _does_ just - he embraces the magic and mystery.

He's embraced this.

Her steps are clumsy on the path; she kicks a smooth stone, gravel from a rock garden perhaps, and it bounces and kicks up dust. Castle bends over and picks it up, all one motion, and she doesn't even know why he did.

She doesn't know him any more than she knows herself. Which is to say, she knows so much, intimate and secret facets, but there are always hidden things, darker things, unspoken impulses.

What does anyone know of anyone else? Castle says that a good character is an amalgamation of two or three paradoxes, those strong traits which seem, on the surface, unable to be reconciled. Like an excellent police detective who feels a startling lack of self-confidence in personal situations.

So if people are a necessary fusion of opposite truths, then what really _is _the truth?

Her mother's headstone is tall and flat, well-defined. It's easy to spot in the sea of irregular granite, and she reaches automatically for Castle's hand, finds her palm jostled by the rock he still holds.

She doesn't let go, their hands carrying the stone together.

She paid for the burial herself, wiped out her savings completely. And here it is, a mound of earth beside her mother's plot, the space which used to be reserved for Kate Beckett, one of the three her father bought decades ago.

The grave marker is already up, _Kate Doe_ chiseled into its face despite the incongruity of it, the strange displacement she feels. At least the poor woman is at rest. And now maybe Kate can be at peace in the world she walks, footsteps no longer haunted by a double.

Grass has been grafted over the mound in sharply cut squares - a jarring jewel of green. "It's - the rest of the lawn is so dead."

"Winter grass," he says confidently. "It grows thickly, and in the summer only thins out a little."

She nods, tracing the mound with her eyes. How incongruous this tuft of Easter green in the dead of winter. "I did the right thing," she says, the dark, churned ground at their feet. "It looks right here." She works very hard so it's not a question.

"Yeah, but where are you gonna be buried?" Castle says. It sounds like a desperate joke, too jovial, too forced.

She squeezes his hand. "With you."

He lets out a long breath, gripping her hand hard enough to grind that rock into her bones. "It's probably a good idea to take care of that. All those terrible details."

"Since I'm a cop?" But he's right. "And well, you're out there with me, so maybe we should, both of us."

He nods, wordlessly, his throat bobbing. She doesn't want to think about making decisions like that for him, for a day _he_ doesn't come back, and she shies away from the vision he's unintentionally put before her.

Instead, another question breaks free. "You put money in my account."

His mouth opens, eyes widely blue, an innocence she almost - almost believes.

"Enough to cover the headstone," she goes on. "The burial was everything I had. Checking and savings both, but I-" She has to take a short, sharp breath at the reality of having nothing. "I _know_ I didn't have enough for the headstone in my checking."

Faintly, Castle makes some kind of motion. "I'm not sure what you're talking about. You cleaned out both accounts?"

A burial is expensive. "I offered to buy the plot from my father," she says finally. "I couldn't afford it."

He nods once. So - so they talked about it? She's not sure. Jim Beckett is vastly unhappy with her, but their history together is rife with debt, and he would never tell her no. She wanted to buy it, and she couldn't, because the funeral itself was so expensive. A burial is thousands - _how_ do bereaved families do this? - and then on top of that - the headstone.

"I thought I would have to leave it unmarked for a while," she admits. "But for you."

He still can't bring himself to lie to her face, she sees. But he doesn't claim the good deed. She has no trouble spending money _with _him, but she's felt like this was something else entirely. And she didn't want Castle to start thinking, in private and in secret, that he was buying a headstone for his - for the former detective.

"You really wiped out all your money on this?" he says. "You said you had stock-"

"Had to sell it," she answers tightly. A weird shiver down her spine. (Like someone is standing on her grave). "I'm appallingly dependent on you this month. And - ha - my retirement portfolio looks pretty desperate too. So, you know, if this was one of your best sellers, it would be the perfect time to cast me aside."

He scoffs, an overly loud sound in the cemetery.

"No, really. You could quite easily make your case," she says, her own voice horrifying for all its cold, anti-sentimental truth-telling. "Now's the time to say it. _You're not Kate._"

"You're my wife," he says, his voice as - serious as the grave. It's a way of naming her, being known. She didn't realize how much she needed someone to believe in her, and she finds her lungs filling with cold, crystal air.

He's claiming her, at least, and whatever else she is, there's this.

"You're my wife, and we'll retire in style, yell theories at the television during those Unsolved Mysteries marathons. And then we're gonna be buried together. Or cremated and our ashes mixed in the same ornate funeral urn, to be passed between our kids' homes, one to the other to the next-"

"How many homes were you planning on there?" she says lightly. But her cheeks are warm. His fingers are pressing a bruise into her palm with the rock.

"They better not be living in _our_ house," he grumbles.

"Maybe I should clarify - how many _kids_ were you thinking we're getting passed around?"

"Oh, you know." He gives a shrug of his shoulders, but he's wearing his panic face. More than she thought, then. More than they've said, which isn't really anything more than - _I want a baby with you_, and _we'll share the work_.

"Mm-hm."

"What?" he says, voice pitching upward. "You know I..."

"I know," she answers, turning her head to glance behind them. As if she has to make sure no one can overhear this. As if she's afraid something is sneaking up. "But I don't want us out-numbered."

"Two is still very - very good," he says quickly. His fingers are so tight, the stone might be a diamond by now.

She squeezes back. "You're very easy to convince. That wasn't even a conversation."

He gasps and shoots a glance at her. "You could've been talked into _more_?"

She twitches her lips, and how _strange_ it is to be talking about their future before the grave of a dead woman with her name, her face. "I could've talked. All I'm saying."

"So, _talk_."

She laughs, shocked too by its sudden burst from her mouth. He grins widely, as if proud of himself, and slides his arms around her waist, tugging her close. She's about to nudge up for a kiss, but he leans out to the side and tosses, very gently, the rock on top of that green-bright grass. It bumps and rolls just before the headstone, settles. She can see a trail in the tender grass where its path tumbled.

She's still got her eyes on the headstone and the rock, tokens and totems for the dead, when he cups her face in his hands and kisses her eyelids, one after another, slowly, giving her time to close them.

When she finds her breath again and opens her eyes, he's serious in his smiling. Giving weight to his amusement. "I won't say I'm not going to enjoy buying you things all month. Outrageous things-"

"Castle," she groans.

"Overpriced things," he kisses the frown of her lips. "Ostentatious things-"

"Couldn't resist the alliteration there, could you?"

"Ornamental things-"

"You're quite loquacious-"

Gasps. "You _know_ what that does to me, those fancy words."

She laughs, finally breaking, and he grins and steals another quick kiss, dropping his hands to her hips before wrapping her in an embrace. She straightens her spine, standing in heels that has her cheek brushing his, and she feels tall enough to be equal to her life again.

He cups her elbows. "I might be buying you things, Kate, but it's only because I love you. Any iteration, any form. Beckett, Castle, Houghton - whatever you want to be."

_Not because you need the money._

"I know," she answers. She's going to have babies, a life, their life. She's going to do everything. "I love you too."

Whoever she is, it's the old life, and it's dead and buried.

And she will walk away from the grave of Kate and take up her life. She will _take_ her life.


End file.
